IT was, he recalls, a year ago that his world threatened to fall apart. Tony Iommi, the iron man of rock, learned he had cancer.

The Black Sabbath guitar giant who bestrode stadium stages had been levelled by the rebellion of tiny cells in his own body.

At the age of 63, he faced the realisation that he might not live much longer.

After finding a lump about an inch wide in the left side of his groin, he thought his prostate was acting up again.

But then came the bombshell diagnosis.

“I was in pain while in New York promoting the first edition of my book, and Ozzy Osbourne told me I ought to get it checked out,” says Tony, now 64, in a new extended edition of his autobiography.

“I came back home to England and had an operation on my prostate. It was painless but afterwards I needed a catheter so over Christmas I had this bloody pipe hanging down with a bag attached to it.

“I couldn’t get up from the bed so my wife Maria was changing the bag and everything. All the stuff she’s had to do, she’s been like a nurse really. Talk about ‘for better or for worse’ – she really got the worse side of it there.

“When the catheter came out I went to see the surgeon, who said: “Good news on the prostate. It’s been cut down to a sensible size now and everything is good there. But on the lump we took out, we found lymphoma.”

Tony was initially told it was follicular lymphoma grade I, at an early stage.

“I was gutted,” he says. “I went home thinking ‘Christ, that’s it, I’ve had it!’

“Cancer meant death to me. I started writing myself off. I would lie awake at night, thinking about selling this, getting rid of that, and preparing everything: who should speak at my funeral and where I’d want to be buried.

“But I also kept thinking ‘I’m not ready to go yet. I’ve got too much to do, and I like being here’.”

Three days later the bad news got worse. Tests now showed the lymphoma was more serious than thought – grade IIIA.

“I went for numerous scans to see if it had spread anywhere else,” says Tony. “It hadn’t. It was all in the left side of my groin.

“I was still suffering from the after-effects of my prostate operation. All the antibiotics and other medication involved had knocked me about a lot and I was really weak and tired. Once I got over that they got me in to start chemotherapy.

"They told me I needed six courses of chemo, one every three weeks. It takes about six or seven hours to give it to you intravenously on a drip.

“The chemo for lymphoma is similar to what they use with other cancers but they put this fourth ingredient in, and that’s an antibody. You can have an allergic reaction to it, so they had to do it slowly at first.

“But the treatment went well.”

There was still a shock in store for the battling Brummie rock and roll star.

“It was after I’d had the first chemo that they told me: ‘You’re going to lose your hair,’ he recalls.

“Initially, nothing much happened and I thought I might be all right. I had the second chemo three weeks later but then I started to feel tired and sick, and when I brushed my hair it all came out.

“Within two or three days the lot had gone. When I’d get up in the night to go to the toilet, I’d look in the mirror and it was ‘Oh God!’

“The hair on my head went first, and some on my chest. My beard and my moustache went thin but nothing drastic happened to my eyebrows.

“I’ve always had long hair, whether it was in the 1960s when they said ‘Oh, get your hair cut!’ or more recently, when it was short compared to back then but still longer than most anybody else’s.

“The hair on my head was gone and that was a terrible shock. The skin underneath was white. It was like an egg. It was so sudden that it was really hard to get used to. I showed it to Ozzy and Geezer, and their first reaction was: ‘You look like your dad!’”

But it wasn’t just a matter of keeping up appearances.

“Being bald, bloody hell, it’s freezing cold,” he says. “I started wearing a beanie but I felt funny in that. I never wear hats normally – but, having chemo, you have to watch your temperature. Mine went dangerously low.

“It was 35 degrees, so we had to try to build that up. My nutritionist Bev de Pons recommended a Russian healing blanket. It’s made from the same stuff that astronauts wear, a silver type of fibre.

“So I’d sit there with this blanket around me and my beanie on my head, Bloody sad, really.

“Seeing myself with no hair, I thought ‘I can’t have that. I don’t want to shock people’. They go by how you look and you can either look ill or look good. If people see me with no hair they’ll say ‘Oh blimey, he looks terrible’.

“So I got in touch with this company called Optima in Birmingham who do hair replacement and wigs for cancer patients, and they did one for me. They were really good and replicated the way my hair had been before.

“My own hair is growing back now, but it’s growing back in the back and on top. There’s a salt and pepper grey on the sides. I actually like it. In a way.”

After three rounds of chemo treatment, Tony’s specialist felt that instead of going for the full six courses, a switch to radiotherapy would be better.

“They gave me a month off, after which I had radiotherapy every day for three weeks,” says Tony. “It takes a lot out of you, and the staff at the hospital were tremendously helpful. However, they don’t put you on a special diet or anything.

“That’s why I have been seeing nutritionists. Bev de Pons had lymphoma herself ten years ago, so she has first-hand knowledge of what a patient needs.

“She’s a naturopath and body energy therapist who uses a treatment where she puts vacuum cups on you that suck onto your skin, which really gets your energy going. That really helped me.

“She gave me advice on my diet and introduced me to John Stirling. a biochemist who owned a company called Biocare. Although he sold that and retired, he continues to do research. He also went through cancer: he had melanoma.

“He told me what to eat and what I should leave off, and he prescribed a cocktail of vitamins. It helped me keep my energy levels and my immune system up.

“With the old radiotherapy they just blasted the whole general cancer area. It would make you very ill. But with the latest technology they can focus on the exact area.

“Having radiotherapy every day often burns away your skin. Thanks to all the nutritional advice, and a cream that they gave me, that didn’t happen in my case. It got painful – it still is – and the after-effects can go on for a year or so – but I didn’t get any blisters.

“My last radiotherapy was in April this year. At the start of the summer I had a check-up, including another scan, and they said it looks quite good.”

Tony Iommi signs copies of his book for fans

Tony is currently out in Los Angeles, writing and recording new songs with his Black Sabbath bandmates – but he is keeping a level head.

“The problem with this disease is that it can come back at any time,” says Tony.

“The surgeon said: ‘It’s not going to go away. You’ve got a 30% chance that it may – but it could more than likely come back at any time.

“‘It is manageable, however,’ he told me. ‘You won’t die from this – you’re more liable to die from something else.’”

“That’s nice, then, I thought. I’ll probably die from something else that the radiation has caused. Bone disease or something!”

He has recently started a new course of treatment – another drip that he must have every two months for two years, with an antibody that will keep the lymphoma in check. “It sort of coats the cancer cells, stops it from going anywhere else,” he explains.

“You want to be strong about it but at the same time there’s this little doubt in your mind that keeps nagging: what if this pops back next week? Every day I’m feeling around for fresh lumps.

“If it comes back it would be the same again: chemo and radiation. It’s very scary and because of it I look at life differently now. I could be here another ten years or just one year – I don’t know.

“I get really dismal about it, lying awake at night thinking: ‘Am I still going to be here this time next year?’

“If I go, what about my daughter Toni and my wife Maria? Maybe we should get a smaller house because the big place we have now would be too much for Maria to manage on her own. Maybe it’s time to scale down anyway and try to live more of a peaceful life.

“But then I think ‘Well, I don’t really want to let the illness take over. I want to almost try to forget about it and just carry on’. I’ve always fought through adversity in my life.

“And with cancer I have no option but to fight. I’ve got to do what I have to do to try and beat it.

“All I’m hoping for these days is that I’m still here in a few years. I enjoy where I’m at now, I really do. It’s a good place. I’ve got a good home life and a good family, great friends and support. And I’m fortunate because I’m still able to go out and play music.

“At the 02 Academy gig in Birmingham Ozzy called me the strongest man he knows. If you measure a man by the amount of love he gets, I must be the strongest man ever.”

• The new extended paperback edition of Tony Iommi: Iron Man , as told to T J Lammers, is published by Simon & Schuster, priced £8.99.